NAME

bge — Broadcom BCM57xx/BCM590x Gigabit/Fast Ethernet driver

SYNOPSIS

To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel
configuration file:
devicemiibusdevicebge
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in
loader.conf(5):
if_bge_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

The bge driver provides support for various NICs based on the Broadcom BCM570x, 571x, 572x,
575x, 576x, 578x, 5776x and 5778x Gigabit Ethernet controller chips and the 590x and 5779x
Fast Ethernet controller chips.
All of these NICs are capable of 10, 100 and 1000Mbps speeds over CAT5 copper cable, except
for the SysKonnect SK-9D41 which supports only 1000Mbps over multimode fiber. The BCM570x
builds upon the technology of the Alteon Tigon II. It has two R4000 CPU cores and is PCI
v2.2 and PCI-X v1.0 compliant. It supports IP, TCP and UDP checksum offload for both
receive and transmit, multiple RX and TX DMA rings for QoS applications, rules-based receive
filtering, and VLAN tag stripping/insertion as well as a 256-bit multicast hash filter.
Additional features may be provided via value-add firmware updates. The BCM570x supports
TBI (ten bit interface) and GMII transceivers, which means it can be used with either copper
or 1000baseX fiber applications. Note however the device only supports a single speed in
TBI mode.
Most BCM5700-based cards also use the Broadcom BCM5401 or BCM5411 10/100/1000 copper gigabit
transceivers, which support autonegotiation of 10, 100 and 1000Mbps modes in full or half
duplex.
The BCM5700, BCM5701, BCM5702, BCM5703, BCM5704 and BCM5717 also support jumbo frames, which
can be configured via the interface MTU setting. Selecting an MTU larger than 1500 bytes
with the ifconfig(8) utility configures the adapter to receive and transmit jumbo frames.
Using jumbo frames can greatly improve performance for certain tasks, such as file transfers
and data streaming.
The bge driver supports the following media types:
autoselect Enable autoselection of the media type and options. The user can manually
override the autoselected mode by adding media options to rc.conf(5).
10baseT/UTP Set 10Mbps operation. The ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can also be used to
select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.
100baseTX Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation. The ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can
also be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.
1000baseTX Set 1000baseTX operation over twisted pair. Only full-duplex mode is
supported.
1000baseSX Set 1000Mbps (Gigabit Ethernet) operation. Both full-duplex and half-duplex
modes are supported.
The bge driver supports the following media options:
full-duplex Force full duplex operation.
half-duplex Force half duplex operation.
For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).

LOADERTUNABLES

The following tunable can be set at the loader(8) prompt before booting the kernel, or
stored in loader.conf(5).
hw.bge.allow_asf
Allow the ASF feature for cooperating with IPMI. Can cause system lockup problems
on a small number of systems. Disabled by default.

SYSCTLVARIABLES

The following variables are available as both sysctl(8) variables and loader(8) tunables:
dev.bge.%d.forced_collapse
Allow collapsing multiple transmit buffers into a single buffer to increase transmit
performance with the cost of CPU cycles. The default value is 0 to disable transmit
buffer collapsing.
dev.bge.%d.forced_udpcsum
Enable UDP transmit checksum offloading even if controller can generate UDP
datagrams with checksum value 0. UDP datagrams with checksum value 0 can confuse
receiver host as it means sender did not compute UDP checksum. The default value is
0 which disables UDP transmit checksum offloading. The interface need to be brought
down and up again before a change takes effect.

DIAGNOSTICS

bge%d:couldn'tmapmemory A fatal initialization error has occurred.
bge%d:couldn'tmapports A fatal initialization error has occurred.
bge%d:couldn'tmapinterrupt A fatal initialization error has occurred.
bge%d:nomemoryforsoftcstruct! The driver failed to allocate memory for per-device
instance information during initialization.
bge%d:failedtoenablememorymapping! The driver failed to initialize PCI shared memory
mapping. This might happen if the card is not in a bus-master slot.
bge%d:nomemoryforjumbobuffers! The driver failed to allocate memory for jumbo frames
during initialization.
bge%d:watchdogtimeout The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a
problem with the network connection (cable).